Digital Information Explosion

Narratives

Some Data on Information Explosion

1. Amount of information

- Lyman & Varian (2003) “estimate that the amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years. . . . Information flows through electronic channels - telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet - contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002, three and a half times more than is recorded in storage media. Ninety eight percent of this total is the information sent and received in telephone calls - including both voice and data on both fixed lines and wireless.”

- WWW contains about 170 terabytes of information on its surface - 17 times the size of the Library of Congress print collections (Lyman & Varian 2003)

- Email generates about 400,000 terabytes of new information each year worldwide (Lyman & Varian 2003)

- IM generates five billion messages a day (750GB), or 274 Terabytes a year ; AOL users exchanged anout 400 million messages per day in 1999 and 2 billion per day in June 2003 (# add reference and update!)

2. Diversity of sources

- billions of web pages, usenet messages, etc.; size of Google index at about 6 billion items in 2004, but will not be disclosed anymore (Eric Schmidt asks users to guess the size of the new index, NYT 2005).

- 439,286,364 hosts advertised in the DNS (July 2006), Internet Systems Consortium: Internet Domain Survey, Jul 2006

- 94,546,719 domains registered as .biz, .com, .net, .org, .us, whois.net

- On July 31, 2006, Technorati tracked its 50 millionth blog, Sifry's State of the Blogosphere

3. Increased use of Internet as information medium

- [# add latest Pew Internet & American Lifetime Project Report]

Adapted from Urs Gasser, The Good, the Bad, and teh Ugly: An Essay on Information Quality Governance on the Internet (Draft)

Relevant Research

Lyman/Varian: How Much Information? (2003)

Franck: The Economy of Attention (1999)

Goldhaber: The Attention Economy and the Net (1997)